From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet

By Vikram Seth

Categories: Biographies & Memoirs, Travel

From Heaven Lake (1983) is Vikram Seth's account of hitchhiking home from China to India in 1981, when he was a student at Nanjing University. After a university trip to Xinjiang, he travels by truck through Qinghai and Tibet to Lhasa and then on to Nepal and Delhi. He describes the drivers, officials and travelers he meets and the bureaucracy of the time. It was his first book of prose.

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• Fareed Zakaria: “And Vikram Seth, whose most astonishing work is a novel in verse, “The Golden Gate,” written in iambic tetrameter and modeled on Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin.” As you read it, you are charmed by the story while still aware and in awe of Seth’s talent.”